The Marie Tharp Visiting Fellowship for Women

Overview

The ADVANCE Program of the Earth Institute at Columbia University will award several Marie Tharp Fellowships each year to promising women scientists. The purpose of the award is to provide an opportunity for women scientists to conduct research at one of the units or related departments within the Earth Institute for a period of one to three months. Fellows will have an opportunity to work with Earth Institute research scientists, faculty, post docs, and graduate students during their fellowship. Marie Tharp Fellows will be appointed Visiting Scientists at the Earth Institute. Each Fellow is expected to participate in ADVANCE activities and make a scientific presentation during her residence at the Earth Institute.

The fellowship is named after Marie Tharp, who has been called “the mother of modern ocean floor cartography.” A pioneer of modern oceanography, Marie Tharp was the first to map details of the ocean floor on a global scale.  She published the pivotal interpretation of mid-ocean ridges and her observations were crucial to the eventual acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift in the Earth sciences. Tharp based her work on data from sonar readings obtained by Maurice Ewing and his team.  Piecing together data from the late 1940s and early 1950s, she and colleague Bruce Heezen discovered a 40,000-mile underwater ridge girdling the globe and established the foundation for the conclusion that the sea floor spreads from central ridges and that the continents are in motion with respect to one another—a revolutionary geological theory at the time.  Years later, satellite images proved Tharp’s maps to be accurate. Tharp came to Columbia in 1948. She then moved to the new Lamont Geological Observatory, where she began work on mapping the ocean floor. In recent years, she has been honored for her scientific contributions by the Library of Congress, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her map of the ocean floor is still the foundation for research and education in the ocean sciences.

Contact

Jennifer Laird, ADVANCE Program Coordinator

The Earth Institute at Columbia University/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

61 Route 9W, PO Box 1000

Palisades, NY 10964-8000

(845) 365 - 8620

laird@ldeo.columbia.edu